Montgomery, Alabama — Scanning through archives may seem like a daunting task, but if you know what you’re looking for — like genealogist Frazine Taylor did — small clues quickly reveal the story of a real person.
“I used to like detective stories,” Taylor said. “That’s what family history is. You having a little piece here and a little piece there.”
For some Black Americans, they are pieces of a picture shattered by systemic racism.
At Alabama State University, Taylor spent decades as an archivist, sifting through documents where humans are only identified by numbers, names are misspelled and racially segregated records leave holes in family trees.
Before she died in July, Taylor hoped to impart on young people the importance of knowing your family history.
“Self-worth. That’s important. You know, like I can sit here and tell you about my family all the way down to some parts of slavery. I feel proud of that,” Taylor said.
In the decades after the Civil War, Black Americans owned an estimated 16 million acres of land, but by the turn of the century, 90% of that had been lost or stolen, amounting to a near $326 billion loss in wealth, according to the American Bar Association.
Taylor said we won’t ever know the full extent of enslaved people and their involvement, “because the records are not there.” Records are missing or obscured, making lines of ownership difficult to follow.
Taylor helped Josephine Bolling McCall uncover the truth about her father’s life and death.
“In doing family history, we start with ourselves and work backwards,” Taylor said.
Elmore Bolling was lynched in 1947, when McCall was just 5 years old. He was a business man who was targeted by a white mob for his success.
“Some people were lynched for merely crossing the street in front of a White person,” McCall said. “My father was lynched because he was doing good. He had not committed a crime. They wanted to cut him down because he was making the wrong example for Blacks in the community.”
That “wrong example” was simply “achievement and helping others to achieve,” she added.
With help from Taylor, McCall wrote a book documenting her father’s story, a full story she didn’t know until she was 35 years old. Despite the tragedy, she says she and her family were never angry.
Taylor spoke to CBS News earlier this year as she was undergoing chemotherapy and had partially retired, but her passion for teaching was untouched. Up until her death, she continued to encourage the next generation to keep looking at the past, through her book and classes on how-to search the archives. At Alabama State, she worked with young librarians, by sharing her knowledge with archivists like Kashonda Murphy.
“The past is important, because it gives us insight into the future. If you don’t know where you’re from, I mean, you don’t know what’s ahead of you,” Murphy said.
It’s important work, even when it’s painful or infuriating.
“It will make you mad,” Taylor said. “It’ll make you where you do not want to do any more research. But who’s gonna do it and document it so that grandkid, or that kid, can be proud of their family? Not what happened to them, but because of who they were.”
Taylor died at 79 years old after a battle with cancer. By her estimates, she helped nearly 10,000 people connect with their past.
James Brown is a special correspondent for CBS News. Brown has served as host for the CBS Television Network’s NFL pre-game show, “The NFL Today,” and had served as play-by-play announcer for the Network’s coverage of college basketball, including the NCAA Tournament.
